Fanonian Concept of Violence

The Central Argument

The main thesis of the book is that freedom must be taken, never given. Because of this, the English title misrepresents the text, since Fanon did not consider colonized people and those subject to international racist policies to be “wretched.” They lived as “damned” people because they all, even the innocent among them, suffer the same plight. The colonizers structure their relationship to the colonized as one of legitimate possession. This means that they see themselves as having a right to the conquered people's land. Thus, when the conquered and colonized fight to regain what they, too, consider to be rightfully theirs, they are accused of attempted theft. In both instances, there is, in other words, a situation of perceived theft. Fanon challenged the nonviolent resolution of this face-off—decolonization. The colonized paying for the land would, in effect, be like their paying robbers to return the goods the robbers stole from them. What's more, colonizing groups also bring a set of values that present their actions as rightful and just, and they bring along their military forces to support them. These values usually ascribe greater worth to the lives of colonizers than to the lives of the colonized. Since the decolonization process requires retrieving the land, standing up to the military, and denying the superiority of the colonizing group, an analytic of violence emerges. When the colonized are asked to be nonviolent, it means that they are asked to request change in a form that is acceptable to the colonizers. In some cases, that means so-called change without the colonizers losing anything.

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